As xkcd notes, pretty much everything in life is optional, but that doesn’t make any of it useless.
Empathy and Excellent Sheep
This course self-iterates, applying the ideals of a makerspace to itself on a consistent basis. One of the driving questions for that iterative work is the old standby, “When will I ever have to use this?”
Answering that questions led to our profiles and set of universal skills and traits — not just an assessment model, but a way of treating the Humanities as the study of being human, which applies to every human being by default. Literature becomes a means of opening ourselves up to new experiences, of developing empathy, etc, and writing becomes the best tool we have for getting at truth.
The most recent version of our universal skills and traits looks like this:
Grade Abatement Profiles with Universal Skills/Traits
The banners on the second page are new this year. The first of those banners, for those of you who need to see it isolated, looks like this:
Click for the printable PDF.
It emphasizes what the rest of course repeatedly does: Empathy is the most important skill you will ever learn. It’s also how you get at the “stuff of growth,” as Ken Robinson said. We’ll look at an essay that addresses this specifically and directly in a moment, as part of a formal assignment. For now, you can consider the answer to the question, “When will I ever have to use this?” in terms of how it will get you into college and then into the job market.
First, colleges want empathy:
You’ll have to read the entire article to gain a sense of how colleges are reevaluating student admissions, but the trend is national and inexorable:
Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, began making changes even before the Turning the Tide report debuted, but it’s since done even more, launching a scholarship for students who exhibit kindness and empathy and recruiting students through community-based organizations. Since it stopped requiring standardized-test scores last year, it drew the highest number of first-generation students in its history.
Kindness and empathy are now just as important as any other transcript element. In a few years, I believe you will see test scores and GPA fade even more, with broad evidence of empathy and collegiality necessary for admission to the best schools. And if this is probably seems like it applies only to high-achieving or Ivy-League-bound students, that’s not the case. The pressure to perform and the dehumanizing aspects of the system affect students across the spectrum.
Which is why I’d invite you all to consider this, too:
That’s a lengthy article on Ivy League schools and the work over the last few years of William Deresiewicz, who wrote Excellent Sheep and a number of related essays. Look past the surface level focus on top-tier schooling and the “excellent sheep” he describes and recognize that all of us are warped by the system. That’s why the New Yorker essay is worth a read. It gives you insights like this, which is actually a quotation from Deresiewicz:
The system manufactures students who are smart and talented and driven, yes, but also anxious, timid, and lost, with little intellectual curiosity and a stunted sense of purpose: trapped in a bubble of privilege, heading meekly in the same direction, great at what they’re doing but with no idea why they’re doing it.
That speaks to our course’s spectrum of skills and traits, from self-awareness to assiduousness. It also mentions again the “bubble of privilege,” which is really a lack of empathy. It doesn’t matter how you define that so-called “soul,” either; a lack of it affects your prospects as you apply to college and work toward a career.
In fact, the job market makes the need even clearer:
Those match up to the skills and traits we use to an encouraging extent, and you’ll once again see empathy and collegiality at the top. The lesson is simple: If you want to be successful, you need to learn how to empathize.
Your Most Important Skill: Empathy
In a high school classroom, we need a way to practice, not just prioritize, the skill of empathy. We will use Chad Fowler for that:
http://lifehacker.com/why-empathy-is-your-most-important-skill-and-how-to-pr-1505011685
That’s Lifehacker’s coverage of the original article, which has also been photocopied for you.
Read and annotate Fowler’s essay, and then find time to practice empathy in each of the four ways he lists. I will give you a document through Google Classroom so you can transcribe your experiences and what they’ve taught you, but you need to look beyond the assignment. Fowler obviously isn’t writing just to high schoolers; you can practice empathy with or without a Google Doc and deadline. You can answer Fowler’s questions, reflect on the experience, be metacognitive about your choices, and try to draw some insight into yourself.
The following list might help you to focus this practice. Keep in mind that there are other ways to approach the work.
- Listen | Do this with any conversation, but look for one that is about “heated topics,” as Fowler puts it. You can also deliberately begin a conversation you know will get heated in order to practice listening.
- Watch and Wonder | Do this during a study hall or lunch period, since they offer the easiest (and least awkward) opportunities.
- Know Your Enemies | For best results, pick an “enemy” with whom you have an ongoing dispute. Follow Fowler closely when thinking about this enemy, putting your thoughts in writing as much as possible. Then reflect on whether this exercise did “reduce your frustration and anxiety over some of the most stressful interpersonal situations.”
- Choose the Other Side | Choose a debate about a subject that matters to you personally — one for which you have a definite position. Then force yourself to take the other side, writing that opposing position out. Focus your metacognition on how easy or difficult this is, what it reveals to you, etc.
Again, a preformatted document will be available through Google Classroom. Use the post here to talk to me about the process, the lessons and learning in the other essays embedded in this post, the overarching importance of empathy, and so on.
Additional Depth
The following two articles are required in AP11 only, but you are all strongly encouraged to find time over the next few weeks to read them. They may be folded in more formally as the subjects of discussions, writing prompts, etc, because they provide more real-world context for empathy. Why would you need to hone the skill? Because you are going to encounter that line between opinion and fact. You are going to need to question your beliefs when they are challenged by someone else. You will need to recognize your own echo chambers and open-mindedness, as well as the expertise and guidance of the folks who want to help you.
If you read these, write something responsive and put it aside. You can ask questions about either in the comment section here, too.
Reading this article, right off the bat, I made a connection to something I think about at least twice a day. “When will I ever have to use this…?” I ask myself that question all of the time. Mostly in math and science, the most structures classes we take. I don’t know when or where I’ll use the derivative of cos(2x)-6 or how many molecules there are in a popcorn kernel. I just don’t see it. However, I don’t think I’ve ever asked myself this question in room 210. It is a class where I know I’ll use the tools taught to us later in life. I know that empathy is an important tool and using the resources like this article, I can see that colleges are shifting their focus from grades to the character of the students. It’s exactly the same as the course. It’s a shift from the test driven classroom to the style that Ken Robinson talked to us about through his video. I just thought that was an interesting connection between the day to day school and this post.
Don’t overlook how you can use those skills now. I think the main difference is not about how the tools we develop in this course will more easily apply to your life after high school; it’s that they more easily apply anywhere. In those other classes you mentioned, you are learning specific facts and details, not skills. Skills like the ones we learn in AP Language are applicable to anything. If you start taking a new math class and the teacher uses a different style of teaching, are you doing to give up and fail? No, you’re going to harness your amenability and assiduousness- habits that you’ve been using all along. When your science teacher hands out a ton of notes, you are going to have the skills to organize them and close read them to internalize the material. The skills prioritized by this course are both flexible and universal in their applications; they will help you wherever you go. But will knowing the formula for a chemical process enable you to memorize the date of the French Revolution? No, it won’t. And that’s where the difference is clear: skills build off of each other and lend themselves to many situations, but specific, arbitrary knowledge is not going to get you anything except a grade on a test.
After reading the post I also made this connection, but one thing that also comes to mind is that schools teach us all of these concepts because you never know what field you will enter once you get out of high school and you may end up using something you learned in 7th grade that you never thought you’d use. I also agree that most colleges and workplaces are shifting from a test driven classroom.
I found the “debating with knives” resource from the photocopy of “Your Most Important Skill: Empathy” (the link didn’t seem to be working): http://pragdave.blogspot.com/2003/06/debating-with-knives.html. This technique seems accessible to anyone, which makes it a great mechanism by which to practice empathy. I’m also interested in how the sides are always even on an issue, so no one will gang up on someone with a less popular viewpoint. Most importantly, we are forced to make our opinions flexible because we have to see both sides readily (at the turn of a knife). The technique also prevents the people involved from attacking each other because soon enough, the person you attacked for having the opposite view will be on your side. Finally, because no one is necessarily tied to the viewpoint that they have to argue, there is little tension in the debate and everyone is open to taking different sides because they might not care so much about the outcome of the debate (it seems like you could make that harder or easier by altering the topic of the argument to one that has a higher level of controversy surrounding it). Could this kind of an exercise be applied to our class as an experiment?
“When will I use this?” Is definitely a question I ask myself many times during the day relating to what we learn in school. Similar to what brendan said, this is usually a question asked during math and science classes. Particularly when we are taught equations or specific formulas we have to use in order to get the answer. However, english particularly this and last year is a class I have never questioned or fought the material. This topic in particular, empathy, is a skill that goes way beyond AP Lang. There are so many things in our everyday life that can be drawn into this class which is probably my favorite thing about it. Our everyday behavior can affect the way we learn and the way to study this is by using the topics we learn in class and using them in our home life.
To possibly start at conversation here in the comment section, as I was reading this post I thought to myself how can choosing the other side in an argument benefit you? I know it can make you extremely frustrated but also able to hear others point of view on things but what else? Any thoughts?
I think you’re right about it letting you see other points of view. However, I predict that, for me, the most important benefit will be opening myself up to the possibility that I am wrong. I hate being wrong and I can be very aggressive when I’m trying to prove that I am right about something. Choosing the other side lets you see the flaws in your own argument. Without acknowledging those flaws, it is possible to think that your argument is completely right, and no one else’s is at all. When that’s the case, people have a tendency to attack others and that’s truly where empathy is lacking. If you accept that many perspectives are valid by arguing in favor of one of them, you will be able to be more objective and open-minded in any discussion. I believe that empathy can only truly be present when everyone is open to their ideas being wrong and other’s ideas having merit too.
I completely agree that acknowledging the other point of view in an argument has its benefits. I think that, regardless of whether or not this changes your initial perspective, it will allow us to have more productive, reasonable debates or discussions. I also agree with Jane, and I know that she is not the only one who feels they act in such a way when it comes to debates. Nobody likes to be told they’re wrong, especially not if they feel passionately about their point of view. Therefore, I agree that when it comes to discussions it is incredibly important to be understanding of the others, and ultimately, empathetic.
I enjoyed reading this post, because it was one that I can relate to. Practicing empathy is really important to me. As a student leader, I’ve recognized how important showing empathy towards others, and taking the time to listen to others is key to understanding one another. I will definitely use the skills mentioned in the article to practice empathy in the future.